Robert Half Technology, 2nd Floor Conference Room

10gen: Intro to MongoDB and Schema Design

One of the challenges that comes with moving to MongoDB is figuring how to best model your data. While most developers have internalized the rules of thumb for designing schemas for RDBMSs, these rules don't always apply to MongoDB. The simple fact that documents can represent rich, schema-free data structures means that we have a lot of viable alternatives to the standard, normalized, relational model. Not only that, MongoDB has several unique features, such as atomic updates and indexed array keys, that greatly influence the kinds of schemas that make sense. Understandably, this begets good questions:

• Are foreign keys permissible, or is it better to represent one-to- many relations withing a single document?
• Are join tables necessary, or is there another technique for building out many-to-many relationships?
• What level of denormalization is appropriate?
• How do my data modeling decisions affect the efficiency of updates and queries?

In this session, we'll answer these questions and more, provide a number of data modeling rules of thumb, and discuss the tradeoffs of various data modeling strategies.

ABOUT THE GROUP: The Portland Ruby Brigade is a user group for Ruby programmers in the Portland Oregon area. Join other developers for presentations and discussions about Ruby, libraries, tools and techniques. The group usually meets on the first Tuesday of the month, "Ruby Tuesday".

ABOUT THE GROUP: The Portland Ruby Brigade is a user group for Ruby programmers in the Portland Oregon area. Join other developers for presentations and discussions about Ruby, libraries, tools and techniques. The group usually meets on the first Tuesday of the month, "Ruby Tuesday".

ABOUT THE GROUP: The Portland Ruby Brigade is a user group for Ruby programmers in the Portland Oregon area. Join other developers for presentations and discussions about Ruby, libraries, tools and techniques. The group usually meets on the first Tuesday of the month, "Ruby Tuesday".

ABOUT THE GROUP: The Portland Ruby Brigade is a user group for Ruby programmers in the Portland Oregon area. Join other developers for presentations and discussions about Ruby, libraries, tools and techniques. The group usually meets on the first Tuesday of the month, "Ruby Tuesday".

ABOUT THE GROUP: The Portland Ruby Brigade is a user group for Ruby programmers in the Portland Oregon area. Join other developers for presentations and discussions about Ruby, libraries, tools and techniques. The group usually meets on the first Tuesday of the month, "Ruby Tuesday".

ABOUT THE GROUP: The Portland Ruby Brigade is a user group for Ruby programmers in the Portland Oregon area. Join other developers for presentations and discussions about Ruby, libraries, tools and techniques. The group usually meets on the first Tuesday of the month, "Ruby Tuesday".

• Markus Roberts will amaze and horrify the masses again with his latest Ruby hangman puzzle.
• Jesse Cooke will present Lorentz, a Redis data store clone he's written for the MagLev Ruby interpreter.
• Tim Felgentreff will share his further adventures in writing a Smalltalk-style Ruby debugger for MagLev.
• Igal Koshevoy will give an overview of using Vagrant to quickly and easily provide consistent development environments for your apps.
• Igal Koshevoy will talk about pragmatic metaprogramming and demonstrate code from Citizenry (http://epdx.org) that demonstrates how to create reusable functionality and eliminate duplicate code.
• We'll also discuss interesting stuff brought up at the recent RubyConf.
• ...and other awesome Ruby-related discussion!

PRESENTATIONS: * Markus Roberts will amaze and horrify you with his latest Ruby hangman puzzle. * Koichi Sasada -- creator of YARV, the official Ruby 1.9 implementation -- will talk about new and exciting Ruby 1.9.3 features and his recent work on improving MRI. * Milind S. Pandit will talk about deploying a Ruby on Rails 3.1 app to Heroku, along with overviews of Heroku and the Rails-based Toto blog engine. • Tim Felgentreff will talk about debugger tooling for MagLev. • Jesse Cooke will talk about Lorentz, a Redis data store clone written on top of the MagLev Ruby interpreter. * Igal Koshevoy will give an overview and demo of using Vagrant for quickly and easily providing consistent development environments for your apps.

ABOUT THE GROUP: The Portland Ruby Brigade is a user group for Ruby programmers in the Portland Oregon area. Join other developers for presentations and discussions about Ruby and its uses.

TALKS * Markus Roberts will present a brand new Ruby Hangman puzzle * Sam Livingston-Gray will give an overview of things he learned at the recent Cascadia Ruby Conference * Igal Koshevoy will talk about the Bundler dependency management tool, and strategies for dynamic dependency injection, deploying, versioning, etc. * Update from the recent Ruby on Rails 3.1 hackfest * ...and much more!

GROUP: The Portland Ruby Brigade is a user group for Ruby programmers in the Portland Oregon area. Join other developers for presentations and discussions about Ruby and its uses.

GROUP: The Portland Ruby Brigade is a user group for Ruby programmers in the Portland Oregon area. Join other developers for presentations and discussions about Ruby and its uses.

VENUE: The building entrance is on SW Columbia between 2nd and 3rd Avenue. The door may be locked, but there's a guard on site that will let you in and you can use the doorbell to summon them. Ask the guard nicely to let you up to the 2nd floor conference room, the elevators require them to use a key card. When you get to the 2nd floor, just follow the "pdxruby" signs. This meeting space is kindly offered to us by Robert Half Technology, a company that provides IT staffing services and positions: http://www.roberthalftechnology.com/

PRESENTATIONS: * Ezra Zygmuntowicz will give a deep technical talk about the Cloud Foundry system he's been working on at VMWare. It's an open source Platform-as-a-Service that plays well with different hosting platforms, frameworks and services. It's written entirely in Ruby and uses bleeding edge features of 1.9, fibers, EventMachine, etc. He'll walk us through the bits and pieces -- no "marketecture", only architecture and deep tech. * Brian Ford will talk about the new Rubinius 2.0 -- http://rubini.us/2011/06/07/inside-rubinius-20-preview/ * Markus Roberts will present another delightful Ruby hangman puzzle

GROUP: The Portland Ruby Brigade is a user group for Ruby programmers in the Portland Oregon area. Join other developers for presentations and discussions about Ruby and its uses.

PRESENTATIONS: * Markus Roberts will present yet another delightful Ruby hangman puzzle. * Ezra Zygmuntowicz will talk about VMWare CloudFoundary and its implementation, a platform-as-a-service he's been working on that's written entirely in Ruby. * Eric Redmond will present "The Holy Grail of Databases", an overview of many database and their support for Ruby and Rails. * Kyle Drake will talk about developing concurrent web applications using EventMachine, EM-Synchrony, and his new Sinatra::Synchrony.

GROUP: The Portland Ruby Brigade is a user group for Ruby programmers in the Portland Oregon area. Join other developers for presentations and discussions about Ruby and its uses.

VENUE: 2nd floor conference room, 222 SW Columbia St., Portland OR 97201. The building entrance is on SW Columbia between 2nd and 3rd Avenue. The door may be locked, but there's a guard on site that will let you in and you can use the doorbell to summon them. Ask the guard nicely to let you up to the 2nd floor conference room, the elevators require them to use a key card. When you get to the 2nd floor, just follow the "pdxruby" signs. This meeting space is kindly offered to us by Robert Half Technology, a company that provides IT staffing services and positions: http://www.roberthalftechnology.com/

PRESENTATIONS

• Jesse Cooke: Experiences with MagLev on a real project, and how to use its unique debugging features.
• Monty Williams: Using MagLev and Sinatra to examine Ruby code generated by metaprogramming.
• Ian Dees: JRuby awesomeness, from the co-author of "Using JRuby" -- http://pragprog.com/titles/jruby/using-jruby
• Reid Beels: How to create idiomatic controllers with less code using the "inherited_resources" Ruby on Rails plugin.
• Audrey Eschright: Code I've deleted recently and what you can learn from this.
• Igal Koshevoy: If there's time left over.... Creating custom plugin architectures, full text searching with Sunspot, and/or extracting reusable code into Ruby on Rails engines.

GROUP: The Portland Ruby Brigade is a user group for Ruby programmers in the Portland Oregon area. Join other developers for presentations and discussions about Ruby and its uses.

VENUE: This meeting’s space is kindly provided by Robert Half Technology at their 2nd Floor Conference Room. Enter the KOIN Tower from SW Columbia between 2nd and 3rd Avenue, take the back elevators to the 2nd floor, and then follow the pdxruby signs.

TOPICS: * Bill Kayser of New Relic will talk about his company's Ruby products for tracking and identifying performance problems. * Group discussion on performance issues and how to fix them. Bring your questions! * Igal Koshevoy will talk about doing full-text searching using Sunspot to help your users find relevant information. * Igal Koshevoy will talk about building a simple, pluggable mechanisms to let folks running your code configure it to use a particular implementation of a feature, e.g. perform search using SQL, Sunspot or something else. * ...more!

GROUP: The Portland Ruby Brigade is a user group for Ruby programmers in the Portland Oregon area. Join other developers for presentations and discussions about Ruby and its uses.

VENUE: This meeting’s space is kindly provided by Robert Half Technology at their 2nd Floor Conference Room. Enter the KOIN Tower from SW Columbia between 2nd and 3rd Avenue, take the back elevators to the 2nd floor, and then follow the pdxruby signs.

GROUP: The Portland Ruby Brigade is a user group for Ruby programmers in the Portland Oregon area. Join other developers for presentations and discussions about Ruby and its uses.

VENUE: This meeting’s space is kindly provided by Robert Half Technology at their 2nd Floor Conference Room. Enter the KOIN Tower from SW Columbia between 2nd and 3rd Avenue, take the back elevators to the 2nd floor, and then follow the pdxruby signs.

GROUP: The Portland Ruby Brigade is a user group for Ruby programmers in the Portland Oregon area. Join other developers for presentations and discussions about Ruby and its uses.

VENUE: This meeting’s space is kindly provided by Robert Half Technology at their 2nd Floor Conference Room. Enter the KOIN Tower from SW Columbia between 2nd and 3rd Avenue, take the back elevators to the 2nd floor, and then follow the pdxruby signs.

PRESENTATIONS * Dhananjay Keskar will discuss how he "applied Ruby meta-programming for creating a DSL for interactive voice response menus for use in telephony apps": https://github.com/dkeskar/twilioflow * David Turnbull and coworkers will present their Googlyscript gem, "a high-performance Closure Compiler build tool": https://github.com/dturnbull/googlyscript * Igal Koshevoy will talk about, "Things I Like About Ruby: A perspective gained from spending too much time writing enterprise application frameworks using sh, awk and sed"

GROUP: The Portland Ruby Brigade is a user group for Ruby programmers in the Portland Oregon area. Join other developers for presentations and discussions about Ruby and its uses.

VENUE: This meeting’s space is kindly provided by Robert Half Technology at their 2nd Floor Conference Room. Enter the KOIN Tower from SW Columbia between 2nd and 3rd Avenue, take the back elevators to the 2nd floor, and then follow the pdxruby signs.

GROUP: The Portland Ruby Brigade is a user group for Ruby programmers in the Portland Oregon area. Join other developers for presentations and discussions about Ruby and its uses.

VENUE: This meeting’s space is kindly provided by Robert Half Technology at their 2nd Floor Conference Room. Enter the KOIN Tower from SW Columbia between 2nd and 3rd Avenue, take the back elevators to the 2nd floor, and then follow the pdxruby signs.

GROUP: The Portland Ruby Brigade is a user group for Ruby programmers in the Portland Oregon area. Join other developers for presentations and discussions about Ruby and its uses.

VENUE: This meeting’s space is kindly provided by Robert Half Technology at their 2nd Floor Conference Room. Enter the KOIN Tower from SW Columbia between 2nd and 3rd Avenue, take the back elevators to the 2nd floor, and then follow the pdxruby signs.

GROUP: The Portland Ruby Brigade is a user group for Ruby programmers in the Portland Oregon area. Join other developers for presentations and discussions about Ruby and its uses.

VENUE: This meeting’s space is kindly provided by Robert Half Technology at their 2nd Floor Conference Room. Enter the KOIN Tower from SW Columbia between 2nd and 3rd Avenue, take the back elevators to the 2nd floor, and then follow the pdxruby signs.

GROUP: The Portland Ruby Brigade is a user group for Ruby programmers in the Portland Oregon area. Join other developers for presentations and discussions about Ruby and its uses.

VENUE: This meeting’s space is kindly provided by Robert Half Technology at their 2nd Floor Conference Room. Enter the KOIN Tower from SW Columbia between 2nd and 3rd Avenue, take the back elevators to the 2nd floor, and then follow the pdxruby signs.

GROUP: The Portland Ruby Brigade is a user group for Ruby programmers in the Portland Oregon area. Join other developers for presentations and discussions about Ruby and its uses.

VENUE: This meeting’s space is kindly provided by Robert Half Technology at their 2nd Floor Conference Room. Enter the KOIN Tower from SW Columbia between 2nd and 3rd Avenue, take the back elevators to the 2nd floor, and then follow the pdxruby signs.

GROUP: The Portland Ruby Brigade is a user group for Ruby programmers in the Portland Oregon area. Join other developers for presentations and discussions about Ruby and its uses.

VENUE: This meeting’s space is kindly provided by Robert Half Technology at their 2nd Floor Conference Room. Enter the KOIN Tower from SW Columbia between 2nd and 3rd Avenue, take the back elevators to the 2nd floor, and then follow the pdxruby signs.

The next Ruby Brigade meeting is coming soon. We've got a some great content lined up, including a special guest from Engine Yard traveling up to Portland just to give us a talk.

PRESENTATIONS:

1. "Ruby Hangman: April Fools Special" -- Markus Roberts will confound and amaze you with his latest puzzle.

2. "Machine Learning and Data Mining Using Ruby" -- Randall Thomas will present a quick and dirty introduction to machine learning and data mining, describe effective ways to apply these, and show how to make use of these using Ruby. Randall works at Engine Yard, is a classically-trained musician, tinkers with robotics, and enjoys coding with Ruby, Erlang and OCaml.

3. "Ruby fixture replacement issues and factory_girl tutorial" -- Igal Koshevoy will provide an overview of the Ruby tools, methods and divergent needs discussed at our recent fixture replacements meetup. He will also provide a quick tutorial of the "factory_girl" fixtures replacement library.

4. "Mid-month unstructured activity meetup discussion" -- The meetup to discuss fixtures replacement was a big success. I'd like to have more similar events in between regular meetings.

5. "Open Source Bridge 2010 raffle" -- You can win a free pass to the Open Source Bridge 2010 conference. For details and to apply, see: http://tinyurl.com/osb10-raffle-pdxruby

GROUP: The Portland Ruby Brigade is a user group for Ruby programmers in the Portland Oregon area. Join other developers for presentations and discussions about Ruby and its uses.

VENUE: This meeting’s space is kindly provided by Robert Half Technology at their 2nd Floor Conference Room. Enter the KOIN Tower from SW Columbia between 2nd and 3rd Avenue, take the back elevators to the 2nd floor, and then follow the pdxruby signs.

Topics: - Ruby Hangman puzzle by Markus Roberts - Sinatra and DataMapper by Jesse Cooke - Bundler by Igal Koshevoy - Coping with fixtures and fixture-like constructs discussion - More!

GROUP: The Portland Ruby Brigade is a user group for Ruby programmers in the Portland Oregon area. Join other developers for presentations and discussions about Ruby and its uses.

VENUE: This meeting’s space is kindly provided by Robert Half Technology at their 2nd Floor Conference Room. Enter the KOIN Tower from SW Columbia between 2nd and 3rd Avenue, take the back elevators to the 2nd floor, and then follow the pdxruby signs.

We're happy to announce that Elisabeth Hendrickson will be speaking to the Portland Agile Users Group on Wednesday the 17th. She's an energetic and informative member of the greater agile community who periodically comes up from the Bay Area to share her knowledge with us. Her talk on ATDD[*] last year at CubeSpace was great fun and well-received.

This year she'll be taking us through an interactive simulation of an agile transition. When she ran this simulation at Agile 2009, it replicated a number of problems I've seen take months and years to play out on real software teams. Bring your team members! It's far less stressful to talk about problems in the context of an evening's simulation than in the context of three years of product development.

Pizza is sponsored by YesMail of InfoGroup Interactive. Pizza and networking start at 6:30; presentation starts at 7. If there's enough interest, we'll go to a pub afterward for further discussion.

[*] Acceptance-Test-Driven Development

The Portland Ruby Brigade is a user group for Ruby programmers in the Portland Oregon area. Join other developers for presentations and discussions about Ruby and its uses.

VENUE: This meeting’s space is kindly provided by Robert Half Technology at their 2nd Floor Conference Room. Enter the KOIN Tower from SW Columbia between 2nd and 3rd Avenue, take the back elevators to the 2nd floor, and then follow the pdxruby signs.

ABOUT: The Portland Ruby Brigade is a user group for Ruby programmers in the Portland Oregon, area. Join other developers for presentations and discussions about Ruby and its uses.

VENUE: This meeting’s space is kindly provided by Robert Half Technology at their 2nd Floor Conference Room. Enter the KOIN Tower from SW Columbia between 2nd and 3rd Avenue, take the back elevators to the 2nd floor, and then follow the pdxruby signs.

Meeting topics: * Markus Roberts presents some particularly puzzling code. * Maher Hawash presents BrowseCMS. * Igal Koshevoy presents ActiveScaffold and home-brewed Snippets. * Other Ruby-based CMS/blog discussions. * ...your great talk here! * And many other topics that come up at the meeting.

The Portland Ruby Brigade is a user group for Ruby programmers in the Portland Oregon, area. Join other developers for presentations and discussions about Ruby and its uses.

VENUE: This meeting’s space is kindly provided by Robert Half Technology at their 2nd Floor Conference Room. Enter the KOIN Tower from SW Columbia between 2nd and 3rd Avenue, take the back elevators to the 2nd floor, and then follow the pdxruby signs.

We're going to do a group activity on TDD. Please bring some tests -- good, bad, or interesting / enlightening in some way. (A USB stick is a good idea.) We’re going to discuss them, refactor them as a group, and generally use them as the fixed points around which we can discuss all things that improve our ability to design well (since design is what TDD is about)

Pizza and networking at 6:30; meeting at 7; beer and discussion afterwards.

The Portland Ruby Brigade is a user group for Ruby programmers in the Portland Oregon, area. Join other developers for presentations and discussions about Ruby and its uses.

VENUE: This meeting’s space is kindly provided by Robert Half Technology at their 2nd Floor Conference Room. Enter the KOIN Tower from SW Columbia between 2nd and 3rd Avenue, take the back elevators to the 2nd floor, and then follow the pdxruby signs.

The Portland Ruby Brigade is a user group for Ruby programmers in the Portland Oregon, area. Join other developers for presentations and discussions about Ruby and its uses.

VENUE: This meeting’s space is kindly provided by Robert Half Technology at their 2nd Floor Conference Room. Enter the KOIN Tower from SW Columbia between 2nd and 3rd Avenue, take the back elevators to the 2nd floor, and then follow the pdxruby signs.

PRESENTATIONS

1. "Ruby, Parser Generators, and External DSLs", Luke Kanies

Using Puppet's Parser as an example, we'll talk about using Parser Generators like YACC and ANTLR to create complete external DSLs - why you would, why you wouldn't, and what's different about them. We'll even delve into some of the more complicated bits like abstract syntax trees.

Luke Kanies has been publishing and speaking on his work in Unix administration since 1997. He has focused on tool development since 2001, developing and publishing multiple simple sysadmin tools and contributing to established products like Cfengine. He founded Reductive Labs in 2005 as a response to the stagnation in sysadmin tools, to be a vehicle for changing the way we interact with and manage our computers. He founded and is the project lead for Puppet, an open-source automation framework written in Ruby, and he is always researching and developing new ways to make it easier to talk to computers on your terms. He has presented on Puppet and other tools around the world, including at OSCON, LISA, Linux.Conf.au, and FOSS.in.

1. "MapProjection, a geographical projection library for Ruby", Duncan Beevers

Duncan is a wrangler of many technologies, primarily Ruby, Ruby on Rails, JavaScript, and ActionScript these days at Kongregate.

1. We're looking for more talks, suggest yours on the mailing list today!

The Portland Ruby Brigade is a user group for Ruby programmers in the Portland, Oregon, area. Join other developers for presentations and discussions about Ruby and its uses.

VENUE: This meeting’s space is kindly provided by Robert Half Technology at their 2nd Floor Conference Room. Enter the KOIN Tower from SW Columbia between 2nd and 3rd Avenue, take the back elevators to the 2nd floor, and then follow the pdxruby signs.

PRESENTATIONS

1. "Ruby Persistence with CouchDB", Jesse Hallett

There are several libraries out there that provide high level interfaces between Ruby and CouchDB. I will give an overview of some of them, discuss the pros and cons of each, and show how these libraries make working with CouchDB easier. Along the way I will talk about the particular types of problems that CouchDB is good at solving.

Jesse Hallett has been designing web applications with Ruby for nearly three years now. He has worked on administrative / record-keeping applications, CMS and Ecommerce platforms, and various other pieces of software. He spends as much time as possible with his fellow geeks in organizations like the Portland Ruby Brigade and the Portland JavaScript Admirers. Jesse has developed a strong interest in the evolving state-of-the-art of client-side JavaScript technology and next generation databases. Jesse is currently developing JavaScript technology at Jive Software.

1. "Testing iPhone apps with Ruby and Cucumber", Ian Dees

This talk begins with a survey of the landscape of iPhone UI testing. In particular, we’ll discuss the groundbreaking work done by Matt Gallagher in stimulating and spidering the iPhone UI with an XPath test script. That will be a natural jumping-off point to explain why a full-fledged “GUI driver” for iPhone apps has been long in coming. We’ll look at different ways to prod at application code, and discuss the tradeoffs. Finally, I’ll introduce a simple library of Ruby glue code to connect Cucumber test scripts to the iPhone. The technique will be very basic, but just powerful enough to test a simple iPhone app.

Pizza, learning and a great time to network with the fabulous PHP Community!

Does your site have a good search mechanism? Does it offer adequate quality for results? Is it a sustainable solution for the foreseeable scale required by your site? This week Chris Irvine will share experiences from a recent project, where he converted a site's traditional search method over to a search service, specifically AWS CloudSearch. Key topics will be:

What can go wrong with typical RDBMS based search solutions?
What is a search service? What does AWS CloudSearch offer specifically?
Live demo: Setup a sample search domain and explore available features
A look at the AWS PHP SDK
Case study: Walk through implementation details for a given site

* How much improvement did we measure? What didn't work?
* Lessons learned, the good and bad of The Cloud.

Chris Irvine is a Senior Technology Consultant and founder at Threeprong.com LLC, specializing in performance tuning, B2B integration, and custom workgroup solutions. He's local to the Portland area and a PSU alum. His professional experience includes management roles in multiple industries, and numerous development and database environments. Much of his recent projects have been in PHP/MySQL, Python, and also the FileMaker workgroup and mobile platforms.

Ian Dees saw his first Timex Sinclair 1000 over 20 years ago, and was instantly hooked. Since then, he’s debugged embedded assembly code using an oscilloscope, written desktop apps in C++, and joyfully employed scripting languages to make testing less painful. Ian currently writes GUI code for handheld instruments as a Software Engineer at Tektronix. Ian is the author of the book Scripted GUI Testing With Ruby: http://pragprog.com/titles/idgtr

The Portland Ruby Brigade is a user group for Ruby programmers in the Portland, Oregon, area. Join other developers for presentations and discussions about Ruby and its uses.

Some of tonight's presentations:

Igal Koshevoy will give an overview of a few different data stores. He will focus mostly on MongoDB and Tokyo Tyrant; but he will also touch on CouchDB. Igal will discuss the pros and cons of these databases, features, performance and how they stack up to relational databases.

Jesse Hallett will expand on CouchDB with an overview of some Ruby libraries that provide high-level interfaces to CouchDB and an open source ORM he's building on top of it. These are the early days of non-relational databases. So in my opinion this is a good time to think hard about what a high-level interface should look like.

There will be a definite Ruby slant to this meeting. But there should also be a lot of information covered that will be useful to people working with any language.

Markus Roberts will tease and amaze us with a new Ruby mystery code sample.

...and more!

NEW VENUE: This meeting’s space is kindly provided by Robert Half Technology at their 2nd Floor Conference Room. Enter the KOIN Tower from SW Columbia between 2nd and 3rd Avenue, take the back elevators to the 2nd floor, and then follow the Ruby signs.

The Portland Ruby Brigade is a user group for Ruby programmers in the Portland, Oregon area. Join other developers for presentations and discussions about Ruby and its uses.

NEW VENUE: This meeting's space is kindly provided by Robert Half Technology at their 2nd Floor Conference Room. Enter the KOIN Tower from SW Columbia between 2nd and 3rd Avenue, take the back elevators to the 2nd floor, and then follow the Ruby signs.

Brian Marick is in town to talk with us about the spirit of Agile:

A problem with the word “Agile” is that everyone already thinks they understand it at a gut level. Worse, everyone already thinks they’re agile in spirit. (After all, the thesaurus tells us the alternative is to be clumsy, stiff, slow, and dull.) So it’s too easy for people to feel free to launch into “doing Agile” without ever having a serious conversation about what that actually means.

This problem is easily fixed. We’ll just stop talking about “Agile” and start speaking of “artisanal retro-futurism crossed with team-scale anarcho-syndicalism.” There is, I think, no danger that anyone will reflexively say, “Yes! That’s just what I’ve been wanting to do all along!”

The new name does more than just encourage conversation. It encourages conversation about those very properties of Agile that have become obscure as Agile has been commoditized. In this session, I’ll unpack the meanings of the new phrase and encourage you to rediscover what’s been lost.

WHAT: September PDXUX.Net Meeting

WHEN: Tuesday 09/16/2008 6:30 p.m. Pizza (by Silvertail Software) 7:00 p.m. Presentation

WHERE: Robert Half Technology KOIN Center (Map) 222 SW Columbia Street Portland, OR 97201

WHO: Kelly White Kelly is an enthusiastic startup junkie working for Earth Class Mail. He has presented at user groups and code camps throughout the northwest. Be warned that Kelly is obsessed with XNA and Silverlight, and should not be taken seriously until he actually accomplishes something of worth with these technologies.

TOPIC: Silverlight Deep Zooming - Some advanced features and demos. - Cover some UX guidelines for using this feature. - Explain why this feature should be avoided (or only used with great care). - Identify guidelines to show what problem sets would require this feature. - How to get started using family vacation photos (demo).

While you're at it, consider visiting our Platinum Sponsors that make these meetings possible:

Robert Half Technology http://www.roberthalftechnology.com/ Silvertail Software http://www.silvertailsoftware.com/

Looking forward to seeing you all there!